Cuba / Cuban Affairs

I’ve been thinking about how we were domesticated… and how they could domesticate us again. Continuing with this theme Part III

                                              The Transposition

No government is perfect. All make mistakes, have flaws, and need renewal. Faced with this reality, there are two possible paths: either errors are recognized and corrected, or what must be changed is acknowledged and changed — or, instead, one’s own faults are denied and “transposed.”

To transpose means “to change place.” How is this used in politics? By moving what is negative elsewhere — taking it out of one’s own yard and putting it into someone else’s. In other words, blaming others for one’s own mistakes.

How have we “Cubanized” this principle over the decades?

The best-known and most repetitive example has been attributing our ever-deepening economic crisis to the “Blockade.” We live on a blessed island, extremely fertile, suitable for many crops, ideal for livestock, surrounded by a sea full of life, and with capable people eager to make progress. So what are we missing? For the “Blockade” to end? We would do much better if state centralization ended, if productive forces were freed, and if incentives were given to production.

We do not want to live in misery, we do not want to live without freedom — and that is why protests have erupted in thousands of places and at thousands of times, showing social discontent and crying out for a change of system. But that cry is “transposed”: it is taken out of the throat of the people and placed in “imperialist throats,” because, according to the official discourse, the demonstrations are “provocations orchestrated by imperialism,” and our demonstrators are simply confused agents who have been manipulated or paid to lend their voices to the enemy.

And when the leaders of the demonstrations are sentenced to long years in prison, that injustice is presented as “justice,” because, again according to the official discourse, “the demonstrators were violent, vandalistic, disruptive of order, and therefore it is only fair that they be imprisoned so that they do not harm society.”

Thanks to social media, we now have independent outlets that expose this behavior of the Government, but their denunciations cannot occupy the space of “legitimate criticism.” Instead, they are placed in the category of “enemy mouthpieces,” “information mercenaries,” and “spreaders of fake news.”

And if any international actor expresses solidarity with the Cuban independent press or openly criticizes the Cuban system, their statement is never placed on the table of self-criticism. Instead, it is returned to the sender with reminders that their own country has similar or worse problems, or that human rights are also violated there — which, if true, only means that there are two of us with the same problem, not that it doesn’t exist here.

Thus, by continuously moving problems from place to place, nothing is resolved. But people grow confused, power remains in place, and the island sinks into immobility — into a place where time stops and people wither away, while they hear, like a distant and endless echo, about the goodness of those who chain us and the foolishness of dreaming about breaking those chains.